{"product_id":"puccini-without-excuses-isbn-9781400077786","title":"Puccini Without Excuses","description":"\u003cp\u003ePuccini is the most beloved composer of opera in the world: one quarter of all opera  performances in the U.S. are of his operas, his music pervades movie soundtracks,  and his plots have infiltrated our popular culture. But,  although Puccini’s art  still captivates audiences and the popularity of such works as \u003ci\u003eTosca, La Bohéme,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eMadama Butterfly\u003c\/i\u003e has never waned, he has long been a victim of critical snobbery  and cultural marginalization.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this witty and informative guide for beginners and  fans alike, William Berger sets the record straight, reclaiming Puccini as a serious  artist. Combining his trademark irreverent humor with passionate enthusiasm, Berger  strikes just the right balance of introductory information and thought-provoking  analysis. He includes a biography, discussions of each opera, a glossary, fun facts  and anecdotes, and above all keen insight into Puccini’s enduring power. For anyone  who loves Puccini and for anyone who just wonders what all the fuss is about, \u003ci\u003ePuccini  Without Excuses\u003c\/i\u003e is funny, challenging, and always a pleasure to read.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eINCLUDES:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• Why Puccini’s art and its message of hope is crucial to our world today\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• How Anglo  audiences often miss the mythic significance of his operas\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• The use of his music  as shorthand in films, from \u003ci\u003eA Room with a View \u003c\/i\u003eto \u003ci\u003eFatal Attraction\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• A scene-by scene  analysis of each opera\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e• A guide to the wealth of available recordings, books, and  videos\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWilliam Berger was born in California and studied Romance languages and music at  the University of California at Santa Cruz. He worked for five years at the San Francisco  Opera Company, where he acquired for the company’s recorded music collection. He  is the author of \u003ci\u003eWagner Without Fear: Learning to Love—and Even Enjoy—Opera’s Most  Demanding Genius \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eVerdi With a Vengeance: An Energetic Guide to the Life and Complete  Works of the King of Opera. \u003c\/i\u003eHe is a frequent lecturer and radio commentator and has  recently been a regular host for New York Public Radio’s \u003ci\u003eOvernight Music. \u003c\/i\u003eHe has  written libretti, performance pieces, and articles on a wide variety of topics including  architecture, religion, and, of course, music. He is a music host for WNYC radio  and lives in New York.\u003c\/p\u003ePart One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    the case of puccini\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Why Puccini? Why Now?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    An Introduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Without Puccini, there is no opera; without opera, the world is an even  drearier place than the evening news would have us think. This book is  aimed, firstly, at people who would have trouble agreeing with either part  of that sentence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To begin with, there is the issue of opera in general. I do not hold with  those who believe that opera is a dying art form. The same things have been  said about opera almost since its invention. Opera was said to be doomed  when the castrati disappeared in the eighteenth century, when the Napoleonic  Wars shut down the conservatories in the early nineteenth century, when  tonality was redefined in the twentieth century, and so on. Movies,  television, radio, and the Internet were each supposed to nail the coffin  lid shut, and all of those media have become part of the opera story. If  opera were mortal, it would have died by now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yet opera has been neatly contained in an obscure corner, thought to be only  for, ahem, \"certain\" people, and this riles me. I believe opera is the most  important art form. It is not the most important because, as is always said,  it subsumes every other art form (which happens to be true), but because at  its best it has the ability to probe deeper into the human experience than  any other art form. There are never any easy answers in opera, and it  promotes critical thinking. This is why fans are always said to be so  passionate. While I can celebrate the high profile of opera in America  today, I wish it were even higher-much higher.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There are, however, impediments to raising this profile. Opera will always  be considered a foreign art form, and we see all our national neuroses about  things foreign in our approach to opera. It will always be marginalized to  some degree. Opera continues to attract the elitist label. That there are  rich people who support and attend the opera is beyond question, but I must  wonder why it is that opera remains the single great signifier of the effete  elite. You have all seen the images on television: overdressed, ancient,  white audiences wielding lorgnettes while overfed woman onstage hits  earsplitting high note. It doesn't matter that this image has little basis  in reality-it exists and is with us forever. Had there never been this  \"opera house of the imagination,\" it would have been necessary to invent it.  And the image continues to keep opera, and all its considerable power, away  from many, many people.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Conversely, the arts marketing people have been working overtime for a  generation or so to combat this idea, and in doing so have perhaps  overstepped their bounds. Opera is not elite, they have maintained. It's  fun, and (worst of all), it's good for you, like cultural cod liver oil.  This is America. We have to believe, or pretend, that something has an  uplifting moral effect in order to support it (cf. baseball). I doubt that  opera has ever made anyone a better person. I don't think baseball has  either, but I love it all the same. Quality should be an end in itself.  Furthermore, opera is elitist, but not in the way it is assumed by  detractors to be. It is phenomenally expensive to produce and always has  been, and therefore must be funded by someone (the king, corporate  foundations, whomever). It is elitist in its performers: only about one in a  million people (by one estimate) is born with the instrument necessary to  make the sounds required, and only very few of them can follow through on  their gift. And it is elitist in its requirements of its audience. We are  expected to pay attention if we are to cull what can be culled from the  experience. We seem to be able to assimilate these ideas in sports. We ought  to be able to do something analogous for opera.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Leaving aside, for now, the issue of opera's continuing, illogical, and  urgent validity in the world today, we must focus on Puccini within that  world. On the one hand, a Puccini fan should have no cause for complaint.  Puccini's works are in the repertory of every company, major and minor, and  are hugely available on recordings and video. The numbers are unreliable,  but I have read that one-fourth of all opera performances in the United  States are of three of Puccini's most popular operas (La bohème, Tosca, and  Madama Butterfly). The number seems plausible. Yet this alone can be a cause  for complaint among fans. There is a tendency toward either fossilization of  performance or hysterical attempts to \"revitalize\" these works, both of  which have the effect of reducing their inherent vitality. In general,  critics, performers, directors, and audiences have reached a stalemate on  this man's art. People like Puccini, and many love him, but one gets the  feeling that he is approached in this country as a sort of guilty pleasure,  like dessert. I never understood this stance, and let me say right off that  I am absolutely allergic to anything that reeks of the sentimental. So how  could I stomach Puccini? I have always found a huge degree of insight in his  works, and was shocked to discover that there were others who didn't.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A hundred years ago, there may have been something \"old-fashioned\" about  Puccini. He relied heavily on melody, with which he was ostentatiously  gifted, and much of the popularity of his operas was due to the \"hit tunes,\"  the big arias, in his work. The general movement of opera composers at the  time was away from a reliance on the aria and toward an absolute horror of  melody. This was a huge issue of debate at the time. It need be less so now.  Audiences seem to comprehend that there are different styles of opera, and  no one in their right mind posits one form only as the right way.  Furthermore, Puccini's arias, magnificent though they may be, are not the  whole of the story. There was recently an interesting movie called À (\"Pi\").  In it, a young mathematician is on the verge of discovering a sequence of  numbers that forms the numerical identity of God. Naturally, everyone wants  to wring the secret out of him, from Wall Street to religious factions. At  one point, our hero is captured and tortured to reveal the equation. He  attempts to explain to his captors, \"It's not the numbers . . . they're just  numbers! It's the spaces in between them and their relationship to each  other-THAT'S where God is!\" It occurred to me that this was the most elegant  explanation of opera I had ever heard. The numbers-that is, the arias, or  the hits, or the \"big\" moments-are not the point. Of course, as in À, they  have to be the \"right\" numbers, but those are not the essence. The point is  the work as a whole. Example: Musetta's famous waltz from Act II of La  bohème. This, by any standards, is a hit. Snippets of it are heard  everywhere. Fine. But later in the opera, Musetta's sometime lover Marcello  will include phrases of the waltz while he is pondering how much he misses  her. It is the same music, yet it is entirely different. And we in the  audience can experience the relation of the two moments to each other, how  there is always something a little painful in joyous moments because we will  know they will pass, and something a little sweet in painful moments because  they cause us to remember the times of fulfillment. This is how one can best  appreciate Puccini's genius. There are lots of great waltzes in the world,  but there is only one Bohème.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Another large problem with the perception of Puccini, I came to realize, is  the issue of verismo. This is the name given to a genre of opera current  around the turn of the last century. It is hard to define: in fact, I  address the issue on nearly every page of this book and must warn you right  off that I never come close to defining it. Suffice it to say for now that  composers like Puccini were seeking a direct communication with their  audiences, avoiding everything that looked like \"artistry\" or \"technique.\"  Of course, they used tons of artistry and technique in their works, but they  still had the elusive ideal of verismo to guide them. In cinema, this trend  became known as neoverismo in a slew of Italian masterpieces from the  mid-twentieth century. (It is called \"neo\" verismo because the operatic and  literary output in the genre fifty years previously was the original  verismo.) Any film student can tell you that most of the films thus  categorized are not \"pure\" in their usage of the techniques of the genre,  which stress the \"invisible hand of the creator.\" In Bicycle Thief, for  example, there is a crowd scene during a sudden rainstorm. The intended  effect is to show people caught, quite casually, in the rain. The few  seconds of film took an entire day and a squadron of Rome's fire department  to get the exact \"impromptu\" effect the director wanted. The same is true  for our contemporary films of the \"Dogma\" school: only one or two films from  Denmark truly qualify as \"Dogma\" films, but their effect on filmmaking in  general is enormous. So while Puccini is not a \"pure\" verismo composer, we  must consider the issues at stake in the genre in order to understand him.  (These issues are explored throughout the book.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The verismo school of opera is not particularly well understood today. Times  change, and audiences and performers naturally respond to certain styles  more easily than to others. Right now, baroque opera is very well  represented in theaters. There are exciting, well-sung productions of  long-neglected works by Handel and others given to enthusiastic audiences.  No one in their right mind could have seen this coming forty years ago.  Furthermore, I see more diverse audiences at those performances than I do at  the standard repertory, all eating it up without the slightest bit of  explanation necessary. Fifty years ago, it would have taken the average  music fan a week of lectures just to be able to sit through such a \"static\"  opera without pulling out his or her hair. Today's audiences take it all in  stride.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Handel's operas are stylized in the extreme and conform to certain  conventions that draw a neon light, so to speak, around the staginess of the  work being given. This is the very opposite of verismo, which seeks to show  life as it is among people as they are. All good and well, but how can we  look for life as it is at the opera house, of all crazy places? Furthermore,  it takes a certain kind of performance to make verismo come alive. The  traditions of performing verismo are quite unacceptable in the world  today-they seem like overacting, overscreeching, and so forth. It simply  doesn't work. But what will work instead? Very, very few performers have  found a formula. While Handel's operas can come to life with the talents and  temperaments of today's performers, verismo eludes a great many of them. Go  and see a master class given by a great retired diva-Renata Scotto's spring  to mind immediately. You can see her working with the young artists, who are  all very talented and who know the techniques of operatic singing quite  well. But when there is a piece of Puccini to be sung and evaluated, watch  her literally trying to pull something out from inside the young singers!  Just hitting the notes will simply not do. You need to feel them, live them,  BE them, and of course deliver them across the footlights. Verismo is often  translated as \"realism\" but the word is closer to \"truth\" in Italian.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Truth-there's a big word, and a big part of the problem. One can find truth  in opera as long as it is fake enough (stylized enough) to allow us to draw  a frame around it. But the direct, in-your-face work of Puccini is strangely  elusive for today's performers and audiences. Puccini is considered \"easy\"  opera and the classic composer to use when introducing new audiences to the  medium. I seriously doubt if that is true in quite the same way it was fifty  years ago. There is something in the frank emotions and lack of intellectual  pretense that makes Puccini remarkably difficult for a modern audience.  Furthermore, there is a remarkable subtlety (yes, subtlety) in his works.  Melodies are driven home when necessary, but many of his most excellent  effects are achieved with a superb economy of expression-a few notes here  and there. We are not equipped to listen as closely as people were a couple  of generations ago, and we miss a lot. Puccini's operas are not short  because they are trivial. They are short because he says what he needs to  efficiently and quickly. In this way, Puccini has become more \"difficult\" to  fathom, while, ironically, a composer such as Wagner has become much easier  for modern audiences than he was a few decades ago. It's time for a new look  at Puccini. All the traditional assumptions have changed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Beyond provoking the groups of people outlined in the first paragraph of  this chapter, the main thrust of this book is aimed at those who want to  delve, or delve more deeply, into the art of Giacomo Puccini. A certain  amount has already been written, from quite specific points of view. And  everyone seems to have a point of view. The musicologists, after a century  of benign neglect or outright hostility, have been forced by the paying  public to admit that Puccini has some musical validity after all. Since all  their contempt (much of which, I will repeat throughout this book, seems  based on thinly veiled racism, or at least on cultural assumptions so  insidious that they border on racism) did not consign Puccini to the dustbin  of history, they have, for a few years now, been turning themselves around  to analyze this music with the same tools they applied to much of the  abstract and emotionally retarded music of the twentieth century and have  managed to discover a vocabulary that allows them to enjoy it without  feeling that they have compromised their values. To be sure, much of what  has been written lately is fine and long overdue: it is my hope that the  reader will be inspired to research such works for his or her own deeper  understanding of the music. I am especially indebted, and will refer  continually, to the great musicological efforts of Mosco Carner, William  Ashbrook, Julian Budden, and, more recently, Michele Girardi, and the fine  biographical work (which contains a good deal more musical insight than some  of the musical commentaries out there) of Mary Jane Philips-Matz. I am also  indebted to and inspired by the wonderful work of Susan Vandiver Nicassio,  whose work opens up greater vistas by using Puccini as a departure point.  But I intend to address the issue in a slightly different way: What is the  art of Puccini about? Why does it continue to captivate people, either  directly in the opera house or in the many other forms where it is  experienced? Since opera is the total performing arts experience, what is  the most total way to experience it?","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303942869221,"sku":"NP9781400077786","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400077786.jpg?v=1767735199","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/puccini-without-excuses-isbn-9781400077786","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}